Jules Michelet

“ Cruel man! do you not see that the poor woman is dying? that she is becoming weaker at every burst of grief? What is it you want? her downfall? But in this prostration of strength, in this terror of despair and abandonment of dignity, is there not already a complete downfall? No; what he wants till now, is, that she may suffer as he does, resemble him in sufferings, and be his partner in his woes and frenzy. He is alone; then let her be alone. He has no family; he hates her as a wife and mother; he wants to make her a lover, a lover of God: he is deceiving himself in deceiving her. ”

“ Every spiritual man, every devout person, every Jesuit in a short robe can speak as well as he in the long one the soft language of pious tenderness. The Jesuits have fallen, but Jesuitism has gained ground. It is no longer requisite to direct the attention every day, for every distinct case, by special equivocations. Love that mingles and confounds everything is the sovereign, most gentle, and powerful equivocation. Lull the will to sleep and there is no longer any intention, "The soul, losing its nonentity in its infinity," will be gently annihilated in the bosom of love. ”

“ All that variegated mass of living heads, that you see so closely assembled around your pulpit are not blocks of stone, but so many living souls. Those yonder are young men, the rising generation, our future society. They are of happy dispositions, full of spirit, fresh and entire, such as God made them, and untamed; they rush forward incautiously even to the very brink of precipices. What! youth, danger, futurity, and hopes clouded with fear—does not all this move you? Will nothing open your fatherly heart? ”

“ The thing you see, is, and ever will be, a cold shadow, without any life to answer you. Do what you will, you will find no responsive throbbing. This will be your despair. You can feign everything, and say everything, except one word, which we defy you to pronounce without grief—the sacred name of love.
Love! why, you have assassinated it! In order to love, you must have a person; but what was a person you have made a thing. Proud man! you who every day summon your Creator to descend upon the altar, you have inverted the order of creation: you have destroyed a being. ”

“ These strange beings, created only to fight, march with a look as void of martial ardour, as their heart is of affection. How could they be reasoned with? What language could be used towards them? What pity could be expected from them? In our wars of religion, in those of the Revolution they were men who fought; each died for the sake of his idea, and, when he fell on the battle-field, he shrouded himself in his faith. Whereas the partisans of the Thirty Years' War have no individual life—no idea of their own; their very breath is but the inspiration of the evil genius who urges them on. ”

“ But the contrast is still more striking, when this inexperienced priest, who has known nothing but his own seminary, sees at his knees a fashionable, intriguing, impassioned woman, who now, perhaps, at the close of her seventh lustrum, has passed through everything sentimental and ideal. What! she ask his advice? she call him father? Why, every word she utters is a revelation for him—astonishment and fear take possession of his soul. If he is not wise enough to hold his tongue, he will be ridiculous. His penitent, who came to him all trembling, will depart laughing. ”

“ It would be something, if this building had but a sorrowful character; even sadness may entertain the soul. No, it is not sad, yet it is not the more cheerful on that account; there is nothing to be said against it, the character and the style being equally null; there is nothing one can even blame. Of what age is the chapel? Neither Gothic nor the renaissance, nor is it even the Jesuit style. Perhaps, then, there is something of the Jansenist austerity? It is by no means austere. What is it then? Nothing. But this nothing causes an overwhelming ennui, such as one would never find elsewhere. ”

“ Which of us has not known, in his life, those moments when violent activity having ruffled our hearts, we hate action, liberty, and ourselves?—when the wave that bore us upon its gentle but treacherous bosom retires suddenly and harshly from beneath, leaving us upon the dry strand—where we remain like a log? Never could the soul, thus stranded, be set in motion again, if it were not, independently of its will, floated off by the waves of Lethe. ”

“ If you require a more serious Jesuit than Fichet, here is Bourdaloue: "Though the priest be in this sacrifice only the substitute of Jesus Christ, it is nevertheless certain, that Jesus Christ submits to him, that He becomes his subject, and renders him, every day upon our altars, the most prompt and exact obedience. If faith did not teach us these truths, could we think that a man could ever attain to such an elevation, and be invested with a character that enables him, if I may say so, to command his sovereign Lord, and make Him descend from heaven?" ”

“ An undeniable truth is here made manifest; which is, that art is the only thing inaccessible to falsehood. Being the offspring of the heart and natural inspiration, it cannot be allied to what is false, it will not be violated; it protests, and if the false triumphs, it dies. All the rest may be aped and acted. They very well managed to make a theology in the sixteenth and a morality in the seventeenth century; but never could they form an art. They can ape the holy and the just; but how can they mimic the beautiful?—Thou art ugly, poor Tartuffe, and ugly shalt thou remain: it is thy token. ”

“ What! that formidable judge, that angel of judgment, is suddenly melted! She, who felt already the cold blade of the sword, feels now the warmth of a kind friendly hand, which raises her from the earth. The transition is too great for her; she had still held up against fear, but this kindness overcomes her. Worn out by her alternate hopes and fears, the feeble person becomes weakness itself.
To be able to have all, and then abstain, is a slippery situation! who will keep his footing on this declivity? ”

“ Spinosa, as early as 1670, had declared the immobility of God, man, and the world, in the unity of substance. And in 1676, Hobbes gave his theory of political fatalism.
Spinosa, Hobbes, and Molinos—death, everywhere, in metaphysics, politics, and morality! What a dismal chorus! They are of one mind without knowing each other or forming any compact; they seem, however, to shout to each other from one extremity of Europe to the other!
Poor human liberty has nothing left but the choice of its suicide ”

“ The bold but innocent language of an angel, pure as light itself, who incessantly points out God in his sweetest revelation, woman suckling, and the divine mysteries of love, emboldened his imitators to make the most perilous equivocations, and was the occasion of their carrying their ambiguous terms to such a pitch, that the line of demarcation between gallantry and devotion, the lover and the spiritual father, became at length invisible. ”

“ The author of the Tartuffe chose his subject, not in society in general, but in a more limited space, in the family circle, the fireside, the holy of holies of modern life. This dramatist, this impious being was, of all men in the world, the one who had most at heart the religion of the family, though he had no family himself. He was both tender and melancholy, and sometimes, in speaking of himself and his domestic griefs, he would utter this grave but characteristic sentence: "I ought to have foreseen that one thing made me unfit for family society; which is my austerity." ”

“ A low voice then says, "Move not; act no more, do not even wish; die in will."—"Happy release! wish for me! There, I give up to you that troublesome liberty, the weight of which oppressed me so much. A soft pillow of faith, a childish obedience is all I now want. Now I shall sleep happily!"
But such people do not sleep, they only dream. How can they, nervous and trembling with weakness, expect to repose? They lie still, it is true; but they are also plunged in dreams. The soul will not act, but the imagination acts without her ”

“ Pray let us exalt this idea, and extend it from the love of woman to universal love, to that which makes the life both of the world and of civil society.
In the world, it calls incessantly from kingdom to kingdom the ever-quickening life, which receives the flame, and goes on rising. It raises from unknown depths beings which it emancipates, and arms with liberty, with the power of acting well or ill, and even of acting against him, who creates them, and makes them free. ”

“ The middle class of people, the citizens and lawyers, from whom she was descended, were endowed from their birth with a keener mind, and a greater spirit of sincerity and truth, than the elegant, noble, but enfeebled families of the sixteenth century. The last comers were fresh; you find them everywhere ardent and serious in literature, warfare, and religion; they impart to the seventeenth century the gravity and holiness of its character. Thus this woman, though a saint, had nevertheless depths of unknown passion. ”

“ Some time must pass away before these discouraging and deadly thoughts pass from theory to practice, and politics become infected with this moral languor.
It is a delicate and interesting moment in every existence, that middle term between the period of increasing vigour and that of old age, when, retaining its brilliancy, it loses its strength, and decay imperceptibly begins. In the month of August the trees have all their leaves, but soon they change colour, many a one grows pale, and in their splendid summer robe you have a presentiment of their autumnal decline. ”

“ Men of money, if I must speak to you in your own money language, I will tell you, that as soon as we shall have an economical government, it will not hesitate to lay out its money for women, to help them to maintain themselves by their industry.
Not only do these sickly women crowd our hospitals, and leave them only to return, but the offspring of these poor exhausted creatures, if they do not die in the Foundling, will be, like their mothers, the habitual inmates of those hospitals. A miserably poor woman is a whole family of sick persons in perspective. ”

“ There is nothing in the life of women, who have the misfortune to have nothing to do, that may not be explained by one single word—loneliness, ennui. Ennui, which is supposed to be a languishing and negative disposition of the mind, is, for a nervous woman, a positive evil impossible to support. It grasps its prey, and gnaws it to the core: whoever suspends the torment for a moment is considered a saviour. ”

“ If we listen to Madame Guyon, our life, after having been crushed, soiled, and destroyed, will revive in God. He who has passed through all the horror of the sepulchre, whose living body has become a corpse, which has held communion with worms, and from rottenness has become ashes and clay—even he will resume his life, and again bloom in the sun.
What can be less credible, or less conformable to nature? She deceives herself and us by equivocal terms. The life she promises us after this death is not our own ”

“ Well! you will have the time, as old age advances, to try in vain to do all over again what is not done twice, to follow in the steps of a son, who, from college to the schools, and from thence into the world, hardly knows his family; and who, if he travels a little, and meets you on his return, will ask you your name. The mother alone could have made you a son; but to do so you ought to have made her what a woman ought to be, strengthened her with your sentiments and ideas, and nourished her with your life. ”

“ Deceit in politics; local life destroyed without creating any central life. Deceit in morals: this polished court, this world of polite people receives an unexpected lesson from the chamber of poisons: the king suppresses the trial, fearing to find every one guilty!—And can devotion be real with such morals?—If you reproach the sixteenth century with its violent fanaticism, if the eighteenth appear to you cynical and devoid of human respect, confess at least also that lying, deceit, and hypocrisy are the predominant features of the seventeenth. ”

“ We are no longer surprised at the furious pride of the priest, who, in his royalty of Rome, has often carried it to greater extremes than all the follies of the emperors, making him despise not only men and things, but his own oath, and the word which he gave as infallible. Every priest being able to make God, can just as well make odd even, or things done things undone, things said things unsaid. The angel is afraid of so much power, and stands back respectfully before this man to see him pass. ”

“ Might not those profound and subtle men of genius, who dived so deeply into the science of directing souls, have entered into refinements, of which the common herd of confessors and directors cannot now conceive any idea? Can you fear anything of the sort from the poor simple priests whom we have now? Pray where are our St. François de Sales, our Bossuets, and our Fenelons? Do you not see that not only the clergy no longer possess such men, but that they have degenerated generally, and as a class. The great majority of the priests are of rustic families. ”

“ The fault, properly interpreted, will turn out, perhaps, to be a merit. At the worst, if found to be a fault, it may be washed out by good works; now, the very best work of all is to devote one's self to the Jesuits, and espouse the Ultramontane interest.
Do you perceive all the skill of the Jesuits in this manoeuvre of theirs? On the one hand, the doctrine of liberty and justice, with which the middle ages had reproached the jurisconsults as pagan and irreconcilable with Christianity, is now adopted by the Jesuits, who show themselves to the world as the friends and champions of free will. ”

“ Chivalry was perfectly aware that love was the most powerful motive for education. That alone did more in the middle ages to advance humanity than all the disputes of school-divinity have been able to do to retard it.
We also have our school-divinity, the spirit of empty abstractions and verbal disputes: we shall be able to combat its influence only by prolonging that of the mother, associating her with education, and by giving the child a well-beloved teacher. Love, they say, is a great master. ”

“ She sees she is ugly. Frightened and wandering, she runs and becomes loathsome. The faster she runs towards God, "the more she is soiled by the dirty paths she must travel in." Poor, naked, ugly, and deformed, she loses a taste for everything, understanding, memory, and will; lastly, she loses together with her will a something or other "that is her favourite," and would be a substitute for all—the idea that she is a child of God. ”